Monthly Archives: June 2017

WorldCat Subscription Change

The library will be altering its OCLC WorldCat subscription beginning July 1st. This change will yield significant savings and will have minimal impact on our faculty and students. It will not affect the timing of interlibrary loan deliveries. That said, there are a couple of changes you should be aware of:

  • You will no longer have the option of submitting an interlibrary loan request directly from WorldCat. Instead, you will need to enter the citation information in ILLiad (Note: ILLiad is the name of the system we use to submit and manage interlibrary loan requests.)
  • You WILL continue to have access to WorldCat.org, but you will only see the holdings of libraries who subscribe to an OCLC product called WorldCat Discovery. A library must subscribe to WorldCat Discovery in order for its holdings to appear in the free Worldcat.org.

If you’re a frequent user of WorldCat and want to search the Discovery version, you can still do so through the Boston Public Library (BPL). The BPL offers free ecards to Massachusetts residents as well as those who “commute to a Massachusetts employer on a sustained and regular basis.” By using this free ecard, you can use Discovery to see the holdings of libraries regardless of whether they subscribe to the product. In other words, you will find holdings of institutions such as UMass Dartmouth and UMass Amherst even though these libraries don’t subscribe.

We understand that the relationship between WorldCat Discovery and WorldCat.org is confusing. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Helpful Links:

Science Fiction Book Club Meeting – American Gods

The Science Fiction Book Club’s second meeting of the summer is less than a month away. On July 19th we’ll be discussing Neil Gaiman’s award winning 2001 novel, American Gods.

Gaiman has had a presence in almost every medium of pop culture: comics, television, film, social media, and books. Gaiman started his career as a journalist but soon fell into the world of comics where his Sandman series helped revolutionize the possibilities of comic storytelling. Shortly after starting Sandman, he began his career as a writer of novels and continued to win lots of awards. His first solo novel, Neverwhere, was first a 6-part television series, also written by him. Both versions of his tale were released in 1996. He’s written so much and in so many different mediums, it’s probably best that I just share his bibliography with you and we’ll get on to why we’re here.

American Gods was his third solo novel and won four awards in 2002*. In early 2013, a 10 year anniversary edition of the “author’s preferred text” was released with thousands of more words added by Gaiman. Just this year, the first season of a TV series was released on Starz to high praise.

Gaiman is very communicative with his fans, tweeting constantly and semi-regularly keeping up a blog. He’s serving as the executive producer for the TV series and often tweets and blogs about the show.

American Gods is available in many local public libraries, through interlibrary loan, as well as through Boston Public Library’s ecard access to Hoopla as an audiobook.

We look forward to seeing you all in Library 314 at 12pm on Wednesday, July 19th to discuss American Gods!

 

*This link has an amazing amount of extra information, like scanned copies of his written notes and references (he thinks) he used to write the book. Beware of spoilers if you haven’t finished!